30 August 2008 8:51 PM

Our Brussels masters predict that Britain will soon be the most crowded country in the whole of Europe. Presumably this is what they want, since it is their laws that have destroyed our borders and abolished British citizenship and British passports (that wretched puce thing in your pocket is an EU passport, not a British one, and the further east you go, the easier they are to get).

The European Commission says there will be almost 80million people crammed into our landscape by 2058. Just imagine all that concrete, the thousands of square miles (or square kilometres as they will be by then) chewed up by bulldozers.

Imagine the unending 24-hour whoosh and grind of traffic, the bulging trains, the seething, noisy, litter-strewn parks on hot summer Sundays, the crowded schools, the endless waits at enormous polyclinics to see a doctor you’ve never met before and will never see again, who probably doesn’t have English as a first language, and the multicultural schools where half the class will always be from somewhere else. I’m quite glad to think I’ll be dead by then.

I’ve always been unmoved by arguments that immigration ‘benefits’ the country economically. Maybe it does, if you eat at restaurants rather than working in them, and then hurry away to expensive areas where no immigrants live. But for most people it’s an unmixed curse.

For the migrants themselves it is often a journey into exploitation and squalor, miserable pay and ten-to-a-room living conditions. It holds down wages and puts unwanted pressure on services, transport and housing which are already under strain.

But there’s something else about it that is profoundly, heartbreakingly sad. When so many of our fellow creatures don’t speak our language, don’t understand our laws and customs, don’t know our history, can’t read our facial expressions or work out when we’re joking, we live at a lower level than we did before.

This was summed up for me by an article in a magazine for Poles working in Britain. Please don’t take this as some kind of rant against Poles. If this country is going to be repopulated by anyone, I’d like it to be Poles, whose hard work, resilience and general civilisation can teach a lot of our own young people a useful lesson.

But the article advised opening electricity and gas accounts with bogus personal details. ‘Once you’ve cheated the Communist government and the Iron Curtain, running rings round British Gas is child’s play. How can I pay bills that aren’t addressed to me?’ the writer asked. Then he added: ‘The accounting system in Britain is based on trust.’ That was the bit that choked me up.

For our entire society is – or rather was – based on trust. But from now on it can’t be. Trust exists between people who know each other well, who share a long history together, who are bound by the ties of unselfishness that grow up only in a stable, ancient society. And now it’s gone.

So we must be ruled by snoopers and carry slave-badge ID cards and, soon enough, register with the police before we can have gas or electricity. And we are not a people any more, just inhabitants of a sort of airstrip, where nobody belongs and everyone is entitled to be.

Babes playing at warmongering

And still they try to foment a new Cold War, though there’s no reason on earth for it. This is not just clueless, but actively dangerous. What would we do if we actually got one? Why, we’d lose it.

Yet baby politicians try to fuel careers by pretending, rather squeakily, to be Winston Churchill. First we have the teenage Tory leader fighting on the beaches in Georgia. Then we have the pubescent Foreign Secretary David Miliband rumbling empty threats in Ukraine.

Once we had people in politics who’d heard a bullet fly and seen what happens when that bullet strikes a human body. Now we have former TV PR men and propeller-headed policy wonks, who probably haven’t even been paintballing, playing at warmongering in a shaky world. Poor Gordon is left waiting for the asteroid

Gordon Brown has now become a pitiable figure, and his public performances are horribly like Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of the tormented Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

Judging from Simon Walters’s account of his interview with the Prime Minister in Beijing, things have gone far beyond the bad, and are now in the realm of the desperate. Mr Brown responded to legitimate questions with false, forced smiles, by turning away from Simon and by resorting to hopeless, dead formulae. He was plainly longing to be rescued, perhaps hoping for an asteroid to arrive and flatten Simon.

I know some of you actively hate Mr Brown, though I think that this is generally because you hate yourselves for having failed to see through Anthony Blair. But, just as the officers in The Caine Mutiny eventually realised that they had wronged poor Queeg, I think it is time to halt this blood sport.

Mr Brown has been destroyed by a prejudiced, shallow Press that switches allegiance as swiftly and meaninglessly as a shoal of goldfish, and never had the guts to challenge Mr Blair or his terrifying mental minder Alastair Campbell. Mr Brown, though ruined, remains Prime Minister only because Labour dare not dump him quite yet. Meanwhile, the media gives a laughably easy ride to the Tories (who would govern just like Mr Brown, only with better accents).

Mr Cameron’s lavish second holiday in Turkey, so very unlike the homely, modest West Country one he publicised, has barely been covered at all.

Why the sisters will be gunning for Palin

Watch as the ultra-feminist sisterhood back away in horror from Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new running mate.

Mrs Palin is technically female, but she’s enthusiastically married, hates abortion and thinks criminals should not be the only people allowed to own guns. She’s everything Hillary Clinton isn’t. In short, she’s the wrong kind of woman.

Which just goes to show that ultra-feminists are not actually interested in promoting women because they’re women. They pretend they are, but really their agenda is a campaign against marriage, in favour of abortion and for every other disastrous liberal and socialist cause that ever existed.

In which case, they really can’t go on pretending that their opponents are women-hating bigots. Not least because they are the bigots – merciless when it comes to a choice between their own convenience and the life of an unborn baby.

Why am I so suspicious about ‘saving pictures for the nation’ and campaigns to get NICE (the worst acronym in modern history) to fork out for very expensive new drugs? Because it always seems to mean large sums of taxpayers’ money being shovelled into already deep pockets. Can’t we manage with one or two fewer Titians? Is there perhaps a cheaper version of the controversial drug available elsewhere? Only asking. How about a new committee called NASTY (National Agency for Speaking Truth to You) to examine these campaigns?

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27 August 2008 1:24 PM

Many of the people who write to me, and many who comment on this site, are would-be censors who would silence me if they had the power to do so. Their mails, phone calls, letters and comments are based on the belief that it was wicked of me to express a view that the writer does not like.

They do not wish to disagree with what I say. They object to my saying it at all.

Such letters contain no actual facts or arguments, only denunciation. Try as I may, I find it difficult to learn anything from most of them except that free speech and thought have seldom been so endangered. This is an ever-growing problem in a society where people are not embarrassed to be intolerant, or ashamed of hating free speech. My article about rape, and compensation for rape victims who admitted to being drunk, was in fact in itself a plea for free speech. My opinion is perfectly legitimate and wholly justifiable. It is grounded in a loathing of crime in general, and of the crime of rape in particular, which I clearly said was a despicable act of treachery which deserved to be severely punished.

The view I set out ( although British government officials had originally taken it) had not been expressed or defended by the government for fear of the tempest of abuse and misrepresentation from the militant ultra-feminist lobby that would howl around the ears of anyone who dared to say it. In the media discussions which I heard, nobody stood up for what the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority had originally done, or even suggested that they might have had a point.

Therefore government ministers and officials were reduced to saying things that were not true - specifically that ‘a victim of rape is not in any way culpable due to alcohol consumption’. They simply caved in, presumably out of fear. In my view, people who cannot stand up for logic and reason, in the face of hysteria , misrepresentation and unreason, should not be paid large salaries out of taxes to be ministers, or given the privileges and powers that go with office.

This week I plan to give the fullest possible answer to those who commented, here and elsewhere, on this article about rape and compensation. Time and space prevent me from answering every single individual remark, but I will try to respond to every sentiment expressed and every major fact produced. If anyone feels that I have missed an important argument or fact, I ask them to point this out to me. It is not intentional.

Let me start, though, with an aside aimed at the amusing site known as 'Christopher Hitchens Watch'. This is normally devoted to denouncing my brother Christopher for straying ( as they believe he has) from the Shining Path of leftist orthodoxy. Its authors like me even less than they like him because I am a right-wing monster who deserted the Left when they were presumably at play-school or yet unborn. They cannot really cope with the fact that their former hero is (for instance) in favour of the Iraq war, whereas I am (for instance) against it. I am right, yet I am bad. It does not compute for them, but even so this confusion is another weapon with which they can wallop their lost leader. So I occasionally feature as a walk-on character.

Last week, amid much abuse of me on the rape article (mainly of an uninteresting and repetitive kind), a contributor to 'Christopher Hitchens Watch' proclaimed "Let's face it, both brothers like to drink to unconsciousness." Now, wait a minute here. This is certainly not true of my brother, though he can drink a great deal and makes no secret of it. But it's even less true of me. This isn't a claim of moral superiority. I have no choice in the matter. I have never been able to drink alcohol in any quantity without becoming horribly, memorably (and soberly) unwell, something I discovered in my teens, when my capacity was slightly less small than it is now. I wouldn't physically be able to drink myself unconscious as I'd be too ill to lose consciousness. I don't want to be pious about this. It's just so. I can cope with about half a bottle of wine as long as I eat a meal with it, and that's it, though I find that even that's stretching things a bit these days. I get far more pleasure from arguing than I do from drink.

Does this make me less sympathetic to drunks than I might otherwise be? Perhaps. I can't say I'm jealous. But I hardly think it has much bearing on the matter. If I could get drunk, I wouldn't be fool enough to claim that it didn't put me at greater risk in certain important ways.

Several of those commenting, seeking to avoid the actual point of the article, headed for this part of the argument and abused me for my own alleged boozing habits, some purporting to believe that half a bottle of wine was some sort of knock-out dose and that i was a hypocrite. This was just an attempt to avoid the point by ignoring the argument and going straight for the person, a well-known cheap trick that proves nothing.

But the word I used was 'drunk' and the example I used was 'several' ( which I would take to mean at the very least four or five) 'Bacardi Breezers', a drink consumed , so far as I know, with the sole intention of making the drinker drunk. Aren't concoctions of this kind , sickly sweet and 5% alcohol, aimed at people who don't like the taste of alcohol but still want to consume it? Isn't there a risk from them that, because the taste of alcohol is masked in syrup, they are not aware of how much they are drinking? Women, as is well known, generally have a lower tolerance of alcohol than men and so are at more risk of becoming drunk. And if anyone really wants to claim that drunkenness is uncommon among modern British young women, good luck to them.

Now to the question of what difference it makes if they are drunk. Now, here's what I never said. I never said that it was their fault if they were then raped. Rape, as I made clear, is entirely the responsibility of the rapist. I am not one of those who blames the victim for being attacked, robbed, or otherwise harmed by crime. On the other hand, I would guess that many of my ultra-feminist critics, being conventional leftists, would tend to blame the victim and sympathise with the attacker in the case of crimes other than rape. Their militant punitive views are reserved for crimes against ultra-feminism, crimes they regard as political offences against the New Order they want ( more of this later).

Unlike them, I am consistent. I think criminals are wholly responsible for their misdeeds and should be punished for them. That very much includes rapists. The fact that a victim was drunk shouldn't reduce the sentence by a single second. In fact, on reflection, I rather think it should increase it, since the treachery involved was greater.

But the issue here was never whether rape should be punished, or by how much. That wasn't in doubt. I made my position on this completely clear in the original article - so clear that a large number of correspondents simply ignored what I said, so here it is again: "Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been." As the ultra-feminists themselves like to ask "What part of this don't you understand?"

The issue was whether the state should pay the same compensation to a sober rape victim as it should pay to a drunk one. In this, the question of 'culpability', that is to say not responsibility for the crime against them, but responsibility for needlessly putting themselves in a position of danger, arises. "Culpability", the thing which Bridget Prentice maintains does not apply to drunk women who get raped, refers to a responsibility in civil law for taking care of yourself. It is not the same as "guilt' which refers to criminal responsibility for a criminal action. Try it another way. The rapist is not culpable for the rape. He is guilty of it. The victim may or may not be partly culpable for creating the conditions in which the rapist could strike.

Tax-funded compensation for being a victim of crime is a new concept in Britain, and I do not know if it exists anywhere else. As I said in my original article it is probably a side-effect of the failure of the British system to catch and punish criminals. I can't think of any other way in which it could be justified, except as a tacit admission that the state has failed in its duty to protect the victim. Instead of justice, I said, the state offers a cheque. It strikes me that a cheque for £11,000 (who worked that figure out?) would be scant compensation for having been raped, and that what has been lost in the rape could not be restored by any amount of money. I should have thought that a serious feminist might actually have made this point. Call me old-fashioned.

I will make one confession of fault. I must admit to having been too vague when I sought to come up with a non-gender-specific parallel to being raped while drunk. My road-accident comparisons weren't good enough. The alternative comparison, of being mugged, put forward by "Rachael" was far better.

She asked: "Would you have been any less deserving of sympathy if [you had been drunk and] someone had mugged or injured you?".

Well, the answer to that is that yes, absolutely, I would have been much less deserving of sympathy if I had been drunk and someone had mugged or injured me. I would have contributed to my undoing by being needlessly and obviously vulnerable, ie partly culpable in civil law for the consequences for which I was claiming compensation. . Would that make the crime against me less heinous? No. Would it mean that my assailant deserved a lesser punishment? No. But, if there were any compensation involved, I would be entitled to less than someone who had been identically attacked while sober.

I can't see anything surprising or inconsistent in this,. I fact, I cannot imagine what other answer I could give. Yet for some reason 'Rachael' seems to assume that my motives for taking this view are selfish, pro-rapist and anti-woman. She insisted "Whatever language you choose to use, it is blatantly obvious that you are placing a degree of responsibility with the victim of rape who is drunk."

In other words, "Even though you say quite clearly and unequivocally that rapists are entirely responsible for their actions, whether their victims are drunk or sober, I will nonetheless conclude that you mean the opposite of what you say, and too bad". Well, how can civilised people argue if one side assumes that the other side is lying, presumably because it has already dismissed the other side as wrong and evil? No free society can last long if disagreement is based on this level of contempt for opponents. This is how opponents become enemies, and argument is replaced by force.

I suppose there may be some confusion here among people who have not read the article carefully, and think that the compensation is paid by the rapist himself. If this were the case, the argument would be wholly different, since the compensation would form part of the punishment, and lower compensation would mean a reduced penalty. But this isn't the case.

Let me stress this central and relevant fact. The compensation forms no part of the rapist's punishment. The compensation is paid by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority out of money raised from taxes, levied on hard-working, wholly innocent people. The rapist does not pay it himself (Nor should he, in my view. The idea that a rape could be expiated with a money payment verges on the obscene. Compensation direct from criminal to victim should be reserved for property crimes).

Even more interesting, the money can be paid when there has been no conviction and even when the person accused of the crime has been acquitted. The standards of proof that rape has been committed (for the purposes of compensation) are significantly lower than those required for the conviction of the alleged rapist. Does this extraordinary fact provide a clue as to why the issue is so sensitive? How many alleged rape victims, whose assailants have been acquitted, have even so qualified for such payments? I shall be looking into this.

Someone called "JW" took a position similar to "Rachael's", assuming that my position was solely aimed at women. "JW" enquired:"Would Mr Hitchens's views have been the same if it was a drunken man who was raped?" Well, of course they would. Why on earth shouldn't they be? What would be the difference? The mind staggers and reels that anyone could imagine otherwise. Once again, we here meet the conviction that I am evil in myself, and concealing secret unspoken views behind the ones I actually express, and quite different from them. I am not allowed to think what I actually think. because I am not orthodox, I must therefore be the embodiment of evil. This is just a way of closing your mind to thought. A conservative who wants rapists punished? Why, that's like a conservative who's against the Iraq war. It doesn't make sense. So he must be lying.

Peter Preston made a more uncomfortable point. He said :"It (my argument) seems to suggest that stupid people deserve less sympathy than others. Certainly some women - and especially some young women -, nowadays released by our national culture from the natural inhibitions of more civilised ages, seem to see no personal risks in foolishly aping the excesses of their menfolk, sometimes, it is reported, paying a very high price of personal trauma for their stupidity."

"Stupid people". Who are they? I don't think 'stupid' can be applied to people in general, only to their actions. Highly intelligent people do stupid things, all the time. Supposedly unintelligent people often do very clever things. It is the action that should be judged, not the person who does it. A person who might be dismissed as stupid by the well-educated could well turn out to be far more use in a real crisis than any of them. Princess Diana, not exactly an intellectual, outwitted the Rolls-Royce minds of the British establishment and nearly destroyed the monarchy in an elaborate and well-planned revenge for slights real or imagined. Was she stupid? I don't think so.

My point remains. A victim who suffers bad consequences which were made more likely by his or her stupid behaviour deserves less sympathy than a victim who behaved wisely and still suffered bad consequences. Anyone disagree with that?

"Medbh" asks "Are women supposed to expect that all men are rapists who will rape as soon the opportunity is there?"

I don't see how my argument leads to this conclusion. Once again, men are responsible for the rapes they commit, not their victims. We are talking about nationalised cash sympathy for the victim, not justice for the culprit. Nobody can know if an apparently civilised person will attempt rape under certain circumstances. All men are obviously not rapists. Some obviously are. The point is, you are more likely to find out if they are rapists if you are drunk and wholly at their mercy than if you are sober and slightly less at their mercy. And anyone with any intelligence can work that out for herself, even if her mother never told her.

The same "Medbh" goes on to ask: "What if a drunk woman goes home with a man she is friends with? Is it still her fault if she gets raped?" What does "Medbh" mean by "still" her fault ? I never said it was her fault under any circumstances. Rape is the fault of the rapist. I said she would be entitled to less sympathy ( and compensation) for her plight if she were drunk. Why does "Medbh" obdurately seek to deny the difference between the two separate statements?

Someone calling himself or (less likely) herself "Fed up from Coventry" asked :"Surely if the woman carries no blame for being raped whilst drunk, the same must apply to the man? Thus, being drunk should be an adequate defence for the perpetrators." I'm so sorry, but I really cannot see what this person is driving at. First, and yet again, the question is not one of blame for the rape itself, but one of the amount of sympathy and compensation for the victim. Why? Because the victim, by behaving irresponsibly, has made it easier for her assailant to behave wickedly. The rape victim is not in any way to blame for the rape, which is wholly the responsibility of the rapist. Rape is an act carried out by the rapist, using force on a weaker person who (in some cases) has trusted him. The point is actually quite different. Drink makes it easier for people to do stupid and wrong things, because it removes the inhibitions that conscience and moral training have placed on us. People who get drunk, and then rape, murder, steal or drive dangerously are not excused their crimes because they got drunk, and nor should they be. The law says that they knew the risks when they decided to get drunk in the first place. Wouldn't it be inconsistent to say that tis applied to civil culpability just as much as it applies to criminal guilt?

But we are getting closer here to what may be the real issue - what actually is rape? Most of us were brought up to believe that it was a violent attack by a male stranger on a female victim, generally in an isolated place. However, thanks to the collapse of marriage and the disappearance of the old courtship rules, it has now been redefined so as to include a much wider range of behaviour. And drink plays an important part in quite a lot of the circumstances which lead to rape in its modern shape. But I'm not going to go into that here, as it would be a whole new article.

Victoria Smith said " It is reasonable to expect that women, as sexual beings, should be able to express sexual availability and interact as active rather than passive sexual beings. Asking them to do otherwise to avoid rape is like asking people to stay indoors after 6pm to avoid being mugged, or asking men to stay celibate in order to avoid false rape accusations, on pain of any compensation being cut. It's not reasonable in a way that, say, asking people not to scream abuse at strangers who might thump them is. Or, say, asking men who drink half a bottle of wine a night to keep their counsel about who the drunken idiot is might be."Up to her final sentence, I entirely agree with her that this is reasonable, though I also think this state of affairs is regrettable . There's little point in pretending that we are going to reinstate marriage and courtship any time soon.. First, she seems to have an inflated idea of the effect of half a bottle of wine. And second, since when did 'expressing sexual availability' mean being drunk?

This brings to mind one fascinating attempt to codify the new relations between men and women, made since the early 1990s at the campus of Antioch College in Ohio. Here's an extract from what is now the Antioch "Sexual Offence Prevention Policy":

"Consent:Consent is defined as the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexualconduct. The following are clarifying points:-Consent is required each and every time there is sexual activity.-All parties must have a clear and accurate understanding of the sexual activity.-The person(s) who initiate(s) the sexual activity is responsible for asking for consent.-The person(s) who are asked are responsible for verbally responding.-Each new level of sexual activity requires consent.-Use of agreed upon forms of communication such as gestures or safe words is acceptable,but must be discussed and verbally agreed to by all parties before sexual activity occurs.-Consent is required regardless of the parties’ relationship, prior sexual history, or currentactivity (e.g. grinding on the dance floor is not consent for further sexual activity).-At any and all times when consent is withdrawn or not verbally agreed to, the sexualactivity must stop immediately.-Silence is not consent.-Body movements and non-verbal responses such as moans are not consent.-A person can not give consent while sleeping.-All parties must have unimpaired judgement (examples that may cause impairment includebut are not limited to alcohol, drugs, mental health conditions, physical health conditions).2-All parties must use safer sex practices.-All parties must disclose personal risk factors and any known STIs. Individuals areresponsible for maintaining awareness of their sexual health.These requirements for consent do not restrict with whom the sexual activity may occur, the type ofsexual activity that occurs, the props/toys/tools that are used, the number of persons involved, thegender(s) or gender expressions of persons involved"

Please note that it insists that all parties (including the woman) must have "unimpaired judgement".This document, especially in its early stages, has been laughed at quite a lot in the past, which I think is unfair. It's a genuine attempt to deal with a big problem that a lot of people don't even want to acknowledge. By trying to deal with it, it admits that a problem exists in the post-Christian world we now inhabit. There's quite a lot more (Google it). The trouble is that an attempt to codify sex in this way is immensely difficult, because it assumes an almost total absence of trust and mutual support. In the end, you could draw up a document on the rules of sex which was as long as the EU Constitution and it still wouldn't have the same force as the Church of England's 1662 marriage service - which is founded precisely upon trust and mutual support, and on permanence - its most crucial and binding clause being "till death us do part".

"Tamara' compared being drunk, a voluntary act, with being mentally ill, which is involuntary. This is slippery, in my view. She also asked "So a man or woman who is killed whilst walking down a street at night is responsible for putting themselves in a dangerous situation? ". To which I would reply, that would depend a bit on the street. In many African cities, the hotel management place guards on the doors after dark to prevent guests leaving the building on foot. If someone ignored these guards, would he be partly culpable if he were then attacked or mugged? Yes, of course. I do not think we yet have anything this bad here. She added "I'm sick of men trying to blame women because they can't admit to the fact that a large proportion of men are sexual predators." Well, so am I, Tamara, though I wonder what you reckon a 'large' proportion is, and what the basis of your claim is. Perhaps your experience is untypical. I would refer you to Wendy Cope's couplet "Write it in fire across the night. Some men are, more or less, all right".

Responsibility for the crime, and culpability for making the crime more likely, are two separate things. Just as prison and compensation are two separate things.

Someone styling herself "Rape Victim" writes :"I'd like to see how you would feel reading this article if you had indeed been raped!So let me ask you, even though I had had a few G&T's and gone home.... and some sick pervert followed me and waited till i got inside my front and then forced himself inside and then raped me... that i do not deserve sympathy because i had had a few drinks?? You are out of order... i am so angry at reading your article." It is difficult, and it is meant to be, to give any response to such a contribution. We must accept that this is a true account of an actual event. But in that case it is not the sort of incident we are talking about. I don't see how the 'few G&Ts' involved in this case have any bearing on the amount of risk. If the rapist was unknown to the victim, followed her home and forced his way into the house, then an entirely sober person would have faced exactly the same danger. I very much hope that I should have written the same article, though perhaps with even more conviction, had I suffered such an outrage.

Greg Clarke wrote :"Your logic follows that a raped fit woman deserves less sympathy then a raped obese woman as fit women are more likely to be raped."No it doesn't, and what a crude way of putting it, too. Do try to read what is written before telling me what my logic leads to. I specifically ruled out any defence based on the idea that a man believed he had been in some way provoked into rape by the attractiveness, allure etc of the woman. I think this is a miserable excuse for an argument and would hate to live in a society where men were presumed to be uncontrollable bundles of animal lust ( as the Prayer Book puts it , 'brute beasts that have no understanding') who couldn't be trusted alone in a room with an attractively-dressed woman .Though such societies do exist, I do not make excuses for them or seek to fall to their standards. Men are obliged to restrain themselves.

A person calling himself/herself "Just deflated" asks : "Where in this article is any blame apportioned to the rapist? To the man who purposefully takes advantage of a woman's drunken state to forcefully violate her? ". Well, "Just deflated", it's right there in the second paragraph, thus : "Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been." Couldn't you read even that far before condemning me without evidence?

"Englishgirl" opines :"Well if you agree with Peter then wow, i guess you're no different than Muslims who think women should cover up and do everything not to tempt men who will rape them any opportunity they get. i guess we should all hide locked up with chastity belts hmm?"

This is another person who condemns without reading. I clearly said as follows :"Nor is being drunk – which makes you miss danger signals, make bad judgments, lose consciousness in unsafe places and then lose your memory, too – comparable with ‘dressing provocatively’ as the feminist thought police would like to pretend.

If women want to dress provocatively, then they should be free to do so, and I say thanks a lot to those who do. Our society is based on self-restraint. We can be provoked and still behave ourselves. We do not need to compel women to dress like bats, as many Muslim countries do, so as to curb the unchained passions of hot-blooded menfolk."

I got into trouble with someone else for that "thanks a lot" remark. Lighten up, is my response.

AS for "Emma", who wrote "The comments agreeing with peter make me so sad as a young girl. I see now all men want to rape me and are waiting for the moment to do this. This makes me never want to date or marry. Men are all just potential monsters", I really cannot identify any comments which suggest that all men want to rape her, or anyone else. Where does she get this from?

It was heartening to read the comment from Shan Morgain. It is easy for men to agree with my position. But for a woman it's much, much harder. It will get you into trouble with the sisterhood if they even suspect you of thinking this sort of thing. What she says is a sad summary of the unhappy position women find themselves in . But its a realistic and an honest one.

As I said at the beginning, if anyone feels that I have not responded to an important argument, I would ask them to point this out and I will try to do so. It is physically impossible to reply to or acknowledge every single message, but I am grateful for the serious purpose of those contributors who have joined the debate with constructive intent, and also for those who, even if they have been intemperate and intolerant, have given me the opportunity to defend my position.

23 August 2008 6:49 PM

Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival.

But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all.

In
fact, they are designed to cover up the truth – that we are an
international failure, that our people are increasingly fat, unfit and
unhealthy, that our schools continue to lose their sports grounds to
development, and that we are, for the most part, one of the least
competitive and sporty countries on Earth.

What’s more, the national anthem played repeatedly in Peking is a song few of us know and almost nobody sings.

East Germany had a similar aim when it spent millions to produce medal winners.

The country itself was a backward, dirty dump, run by horrible old men
and women, shrouded in a smog of two-stroke exhaust, brown coal smoke
and cabbage fumes.

But at the Olympics it managed to appear to be modern, clean, youthful and bright.

And we have to pretend that Olympic success matters, just as they did, because we have nothing else to be proud of.

We
achieve this by levying a tax on the sad, the deluded and the hopeless,
called the National Lottery, and spending the money bamboozled out of
these poor people on velodromes where cyclists dressed as spacemen
whizz endlessly round under the cold gaze of ruthless trainers.

Our
industries may have vanished, our fisheries may have been stolen, our
streets may be increasingly dangerous. But, gosh, wow, we have lots of
gold medals.

And we hope to stage our own Olympics four
years hence – greedily seizing the chance, as Third World nations
always do, to pretend that we’re going up, when in fact we’re on the
way down.

I’m pleased, of course, for the individual medal
winners – especially Rebecca Adlington, who would probably have won a
medal without any help fromthe hateful Lottery.

But their achievements are their own, not mine. It makes no difference to my life, or yours.

And
how odd it is that all this effort, all this money and talent should
have been devoted to succeeding in a contest which is, deep down, quite
meaningless.

Politicians of all the Liberal Elite parties
join in praising the way it has been done. Yet if anyone advocates the
same methods in our State education system – ruthless selection,
encouragement of the best, harsh discipline, no tolerance of failure –
he is dismissed by the same politicians as an ‘elitist’.

Well,
excuse me, but isn’t it far more important that we survive as an
economy and a society in this hard, competitive and increasingly
merciless world than that we gain a few shiny knick-knacks in an
athletics meeting?

Let John Major, Michael Gove, Gordon
Brown, Tessa Jowell and the rest of the supporters of comprehensive
schools and diluted exams and socialised university entrance apply
their principles to Britain’s 2012 Olympic team.

Your parents
went to university? You’re rejected, so as to give an opportunity to
someone who can’t swim as fast but needs encouragement.

You went
to a private school? You’re rejected, too. We can’t have any privilege
here, even if your parents bankrupted themselves to pay the fees. Your
place will go to someone slower and less fit.

You passed a
tough test way ahead of the others? Sorry, you’ll just have to go at
the speed of the slowest in a mixed-ability training squad.

You’re talented but you live in a poor area? Too bad. All our best training schemes are in rich suburbs.

You’re doing really well? No help for you, then. Our concern is for equality, not excellence.

You’re slow, undisciplined, disruptive and no good? Have a special trainer and lots of resources.

If
we nurtured our Olympic hopefuls the way we educate our children, the
only role they’d have in any Games would be sweeping up litter in the
stadium.

I have seldom seen a better example of an entire country getting its priorities wrong.

The day will come, and quite soon, when we win no medals and realise what we have become.

But I suspect, by then, it will be too late.

I wish we were more like Russia

I remember the day in 1991 when the Kremlin stopped being a threat to
Britain, a bright August morning in Moscow as the tanks withdrew from
the end of my street, the Stalinist vigilantes packed up their little
checkpoint in my block of flats and the KGB-sponsored putsch collapsed.

The bins were full of torn-up and half-burned red and gold Communist Party cards. Communism was gone for ever.

It
has not come back. Private life, Christianity and family life returned
and are (in some ways) now less threatened in Moscow than here in
Britain.

I had been a militant pro-Washington Cold Warrior. I had been
despised and sneered at by much of my own fellow-travelling generation.

They were specially nasty when I opposed communist
infiltration in the unions, or attacked CND and pointed out that the
nuclear threat to this country came from Soviet missiles, not from our
own.

I knew my enemy at home and abroad, inside-out. And
from that 1991 day onwards, Russia was not my enemy any more, just a
big European country that I was lucky to have lived in, puzzling, cruel
and harsh in some ways, deeply touching in others.

The German-dominated EU, it quickly emerged, was now a much more potent and urgent menace to British liberty and independence.

I am baffled that so many conservative-minded people in Britain and America cannot see this simple point.

They
continue to rage about the alleged Russian menace, when Russia’s armed
forces are a junk-shop of fizzing, flatulent scrap metal largely manned
by corrupt drunkards, backed up by a fleet of half-sunk, rusting ships.

They babble of a new Cold War, when communism – the whole issue of that war – is dead in Russia.

But
it has come to life again in Britain and America as political
correctness, which is destroying all the things we fought the Cold War
to save.

They fancy that the Western Left still has sympathy for Russia. I haven’t noticed it.

Leftist
‘thinkers’ are switching to supporting neo-conservative Washington,
which has taken over the Kremlin’s old role of invading other people’s
countries for their own good, even copying Soviet Moscow’s unhinged
invasion of Afghanistan.

Actually, I often wish we were more
like Russia, aggressively defending our interests, making sure we owned
our own crucial industries, killing terrorists instead of giving in to
them, running our own foreign policy instead of trotting two feet
behind George W. Bush.

Russia, oddly enough, has come to stand for national sovereignty and independence, while we give up our own.

20 August 2008 1:36 PM

Dyslexia, as one might expect, could not be discussed without a jolly sprinkling of personal abuse and the pointless misrepresentation of my position by opponents. It is far more risky publicly to doubt the existence of 'ADHD' or 'Dyslexia' than to doubt the existence of God, despite the assumed bravado of the new wave of atheists, who are in fact merely the camp followers of a battle fought long ago by others who did actually need to be brave. If the supporters of these beliefs in medical explanations for the collapse in literacy and the severe deterioration in the behaviour of small boys felt genuinely safe with their 'diagnosis' they wouldn't get so upset when they were challenged. When will people learn that vituperative rage in argument is a demonstration of weakness?

I was, as usual, accused of saying that people who claim they suffer from 'dyslexia' are stupid, an opinion I do not hold and have never expressed. Howard Medwell -slightly more temperately -asked: "What on earth is the point of making a general, pig-ignorant assault on scientific theories of language and learning? What other categories of neurologically determined learning and language disability do you regard as leftie myths - autism? Down's Syndrome? Strokes? Alzheimer's disease?"

If Mr Medwell knows of an objective "neurologically-determined" definition of 'dyslexia' which stands up to Karl Popper's test - ie is capable of disproof - can he let me know what it is and where I can find it? Likewise, an objective, measurable method of diagnosing its presence or absence in an alleged sufferer would be helpful, especially one that could be distinguished from a normal inability to read and write. I may or may not be pig-ignorant, but it is not really for me to say. But I can spot a duff argument when I see one. And Mr Medwell advances one: The comparison with strokes, which have defined physical characteristics, and with Down's Syndrome, which likewise manifests itself in measurable and identifiable physical ways, is surely not valid. As for Autism, I think there is room for controversy over the 'diagnosis' of this cloudily-defined complaint. Like 'ADHD' and 'Dyslexia' it suffers from a major difficulty(see below).

I am quite ready to accept that a small number of people suffer from objective physical neurological impairments which influence their behaviour and their learning ability in various ways. There is absolutely no doubt that brain damage of various kinds can create such effects in previously untroubled people. I might add that it is also the case that neurology is in its infancy, and our knowledge of the human brain ( and of how to repair it) far more limited than most people imagine.

But the categories of 'Dyslexia' and 'ADHD' are also applied to many others who, in my view, are victims of the incompetence, sterility, tedium and feminisation of our school system, the general absence of fathers and stable family life, plus the terrible distractions and vile diet of modern life to which children are exposed, the almost total lack of physical exercise in their lives, and the sleeplessness which follow these things. By applying the same 'diagnosis' to both groups, the advocates for these causes destroy their own cases. they simply cannot be the same, could not possibly be countered or alleviated by the same methods. Nobody on the pro-'ADHD' or pro 'dyslexia' side has even responded to this point, though I have made it countless times

This argument is important because ultimately it is about human freedom, and about the concealing of serious social problems by pseudo-medical flummery. Increasingly it is also about the cynical medicalisation of normal human characteristics, so as to deprive us of responsibility for anything and persuade us to take expensive drugs when we are not ill. Everyone who engages in this argument knows it is important, which is why it arouses such passions and why so many people would like to shut me up, which is what most of my critics hope to achieve. There is a tone of voice in these attacks which suggests actual anger that dissent on this subject can be expressed at all, and wants it stopped - itself a very unhealthy thing and a sign of the insecurity of these lobbies. Those of us who continue to seek to tell what we believe is the truth, from a conservative point of view, feel as each day passes the clammy hands of would-be censors plucking at our sleeves.

The usual tactics of 'emotional censorship' ( ludicrous claims to have been personally insulted by general comments, suggestions that I have no 'right' to express such views, and one communication asking if it was legal to deny the existence of a complaint recognised by the Disabilities Discrimination Act) were employed.

People often take positions for emotional, rather than rational reasons. They find it shocking that others aren't swept up in the same torrent. That is why many people do not realise why this subject produces such passions, even when their own passions are involved. I suspect Mr Medwell does know why, which is why I am surprised by his response.

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I was struck by the poignant plea from Jon Hart, in Taiwan, for advice on how to conduct his life in a morally tolerable way. I am not, thank heaven, in the agony business, so I'll reply very generally. I long ago decided that modern politics, with its supposed solution for every ill and its ridiculous belief in the power of governments to begin the world over again, was a false religion, offering nothing but disappointment and cynicism to its devotees. I once wrote an article about this which used to be findable on the web. My purpose in engaging in politics at all is to try to drive politics back to the areas where it belongs - the impartial encouragement of virtue and the discouragement of vice through impartial law and justice, the defence of the realm against threats from within and without, the creation of conditions in which conscience, human charity and neighbourliness can flourish rather than atrophy.

The more we fail in this, and the more utopian despotism invades our lives and takes away our freedom to decide for ourselves, the less we are proper men and women. This leads to awful dilemmas like the one faced by the person who sees an act of savagery and decides not to intervene. The violent ferals have themselves been brought up without example or morals, their consciences are shrivelled, feeble things which have never been encouraged and have often been actively discouraged, and they are wholly deaf to appeals to goodness. They are also probably 'disinhibited' by drink or drugs or both, and so capable of appalling acts of savagery. They may well kill you, or leave you dribbling in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, if you so much as look at them in the wrong way.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are softened by having grown up in a society where such people were rare, and where we did not need to be skilled at the arts of violence to make it from one end of our lives to another. The idea that a law-abiding Christian man ought to know how to defend himself with fists, sword or gun, still common up till the 18th century, has entirely faded away. We also live in a state which has specifically taken away our freedom to act decisively in defence of ourselves and others. This is now called 'taking the law into your own hands ' ( a disgusting phrase which implies that the law is not ours in the first place) and is severely punished.

For me, the decisive argument against intervening in such situations is that it is bound to be ineffective. I am also influenced by one experience when I did intervene to rescue a woman from a man who was beating her in the street. I got a black eye for my pains, and then watched the assailant go off into the dark with his victim, who didn't seem to be at all grateful to have been rescued. I agree that this is not always what happens, but it does rather put you off knight errantry when it does. Above all I am haunted by the fact that, unless I am very lucky or bluff very effectively, any intervention i try to make will fail, and leave me dead or badly injured. So what possible gain is there in me trying? I suggest people younger than I am should get themselves trained in martial arts, so that they have less reason to take shameful decisions to turn away. But I think it's a bit late for me.

The question of how to try to live a good life in a bad world is a very old one, and I don't feel specially equipped to try to provide any new answers. For consolation and instruction on how to approach the subject, I always recommend the 1662 Book of Common Prayer ( in the USA the 1928 Book) and especially the beautiful and resonant weekly collects (which English children once learned by heart). But there is no doubt that trying to do so will get you into all kinds of trouble. Is it justifiable to go off and cultivate your own garden, doing good in minute particulars where you can? Quite possibly, but do not be surprised if you wake one morning to find that garden trampled and ravaged by invaders.

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On the question of Mandela versus Solzhenitsyn, several people immediately got my point that Solzhenitsyn never condoned violence, despite the fact that he faced an armed and violent state far more repressive than apartheid South Africa. Others chose to avoid this. They accused me of some sort of hostility to Mr Mandela, as if this killed off my criticisms of him. This is circular - and often used by defenders of Mr Cameron in the same way.

It goes like this: "You attack David Cameron a lot. This is because you don't like him, or because you are still smarting over the fact that in 1999 you were beaten by Michael Portillo for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea (This ludicrous claim is made so often that I often wonder who spreads it. Of course Michael Portillo was going to get the nomination. I knew that when I put my name forward. I would have been astonished beyond belief has I been selected, and never expected to be, which is one of many reasons I am not smarting over it nine years later). Therefore we can ignore your criticisms."

It ignores the possibility that I might criticise David Cameron, or Nelson Mandela, because I disagree with their opinions or actions and - above all - because I refuse to accept a lazy consensus of received opinion. This tends to mean that my criticisms of them stand out, surrounded as I am by people who will never attack them. Whereas if I did as I am always asked to, and spent all my time uselessly attacking Gordon Brown just like everyone else, I would merely be spitting into an ocean of scorn, and nobody would accuse me of doing so from a personal animus.

I am perfectly happy to praise Mr Mandela's many undoubted good actions, and have specifically done so several times. I did so in the TV programme I made about him, a fact which rather baffled left-wing TV critics who were unable to conceive of anyone being simultaneously politically critical and personally fair. I regard the White South African regime which began in 1948 as despicable and stupid. The problem with Mr Mandela is that he acted as a willing figleaf for the ANC, a largely Communist-controlled movement which had and has many faults and in my view helped to keep the Apartheid regime alive for many years after it should have ended. had there been a better alternative available, one that wasn't a slavish supporter of Moscow, the USA and Western Europe would have been much more willing to pull the plug on Pretoria.

Mr Mandela has also been willing to praise a wide variety of very nasty third world despots. While he was President, many bad decisions were taken by the ANC. If he had no control over these things, then he shouldn't have been President. He simply does not deserve the adulation heaped on him, something he himself modestly acknowledges when he gets the chance. It is his cult and his acolytes I attack, not the man himself.

Various points are made about how the USSR was not a racially-prejudiced regime. Well, it's true that there was no Grand Apartheid in the Soviet Union. However, there was a great deal of Judophobia (if Stalin had lived, a major anti-Jewish purge would have taken place in 1953 based on the phantasmal 'Doctors' plot', and many of the purges in Eastern Europe about this time had a distinctly anti-Jewish tinge, especially the judicial murder of Rudolf Slansky in the Prague trials. This persisted in low-level ways right into the 1980s. Jewish doctors were generally not allowed to treat Politburo members. Those who read Vasily Grossman's interesting novel 'Life and Fate' will find several descriptions, drawn from the life, of anti-Jewish actions by the Soviet state.

Incidentally, for all its identification with 'anti-racism' in other countries, the Soviet Union did little or nothing to discourage crude racial discrimination on its own territory, especially against people from the Caucasus (Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris) . When I was in Moscow, they generally expected to receive rough treatment from the Militia (the Soviet police) and were widely referred to by ethnic Russians - even educated ones - with some contempt as "Chorny" ('Black). African students at the Lumumba University in Moscow often encountered crude racial abuse of a kind long stamped out in Western Europe.

As to the question of whether South Africa was more or less repressive than the USSR, one contributor suggested that this was so for whites, but not for blacks. Again, I don't wish to defend Apartheid South Africa, and will not do so, but some things are a matter of fact. Nelson Mandela and other black activists were given trials at which they were able to defend themselves eloquently and in public, and whose outcomes and sentences were not determined in advance. South Africa also tolerated the existence of a critical press, often run by very courageous people, and of an opposition party. This was never possible in the USSR.

Helen Suzman, who ceaselessly attacked the nationalists in the whites-only Parliament, is now largely written out of South African history. The role of white non-Communists in the battle, like the role of the Anglican Church, is likewise given little time. A visitor to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (a very disappointing experience, in my view) sees very little about anything other than the ANC.

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Why, oh why, does Mr "Demetriou" never actually pay any attention to the replies he gets to his arguments, especially the factual ones? He simply says the same thing over and over again, and then over and over again. And then over and over and over again. He is urging me to join the Tories and seek 'change from within'. Surely he knows, for I have often told readers of this site so, that I did exactly this, or rather attempted to, and found two things.

One was that there is no mechanism at all in the Tory Party through which ordinary members can exert influence on policy. Tory policy is not made by members, or even by MPs but by an undefined unanswerable cabal surrounding the leader's office. Even the Labour Party gave its members more say (or rather used to do so). Before the New Labour machine filleted the rule book, Labour allowed those who organised among Constituency Parties and in the Unions to influence policy and constitution - though since the left effectively destroyed the Labour right in the constitutional battles of the late 1970s and early 1980s there has been little of this.

These, by the way, were the battles which the pro-Communist Left won, while an ill-informed and gullible media concentrated on the symbolic crushing of the insignificant Militant Tendency. They all found it too difficult to understand the real left-wing forces in Labour - the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the Labour Coordinating Committee ( ludicrously misrepresented in some biographies of Anthony Blair as 'moderate') and the potent network run and directed by the Communist Party's industrial organisation and its fellow-travellers in the major unions. These groups destroyed the independence of individual Labour MPs by forcing them to go through mandatory reselection, and stole their power to elect the leader by creating an 'electoral college' in which the unions had a decisive say.

Labour's internal 'democracy' was also hugely distorted by the power of the union block vote, which (like the Tory Party leadership group) was largely arranged and wielded through unaccountable cabals. The major example of a membership revolt in British politics was William Rodgers's 'Campaign for Democratic Socialism' in the 1960s, which eventually defeated the unilateral nuclear disarmers. Such a body could have no influence in the Tory Party, since the ward and general management committee meetings through which it worked have no counterpart in the Tory structure. Motions debated' at Tory conferences have no significance and nobody is obliged to take any notice of them at all. Labour under the Blairites adopted several of these practices, and the Labour conference, once quite a lively battleground between factions with genuine disagreement on display, is now as dead as the Tory one always was, and continues to be.

As for what I did in the Hague era, I can say only that I met quite a lot of senior Tories, and from conversations with them realised that they were in fact social democrats, with whom I disagreed on almost every major matter of principle. I concluded that it was as likely that they would follow conservative policies as that a tortoise would win the Grand National. It was silly ever to expect them to do so, and I do not. The great thing about David Cameron is that he is entirely open about this, and I am constantly thankful for him for parading his social democratic beliefs. Alas, tribal Tories such as Mr "Demetriou" won't listen.

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Amusingly, Dion Thomas presumes that I am attacking 'The Dark Knight' in my general remarks on fashionably 'dark' films, and then gives me a lecture on how I shouldn't attack films I haven't seen. Wait please, Dion Thomas, until I attack it without seeing it, before you attack me . Otherwise people might attack you for attacking me without reading me. I get the impression from the responses of this film's defenders that they think it is the sort of film I am attacking, which gives me a good idea of the sort of film it is. But had I wanted to attack it specifically, I should have done so. I didn't. But I did sit through a large chunk of the last 'Batman' movie on an aeroplane a few months ago, and it seemed to me to be pretentious, dull twaddle. I found myself watching the navigation lights flashing on the wing instead, as it was more interesting.

There's also a faction which blames the people who issue 12A certificates, rather than the people who make nasty films which qualify for such certificates. I should have thought that the movie industry have quite a lot of influence over how the rules for certificates are framed, and know exactly how far they can go to ensure the audience it seeks , and would be surprised if they hadn't lobbied for the 12A category. In the end, the people who make the films are responsible for what they put in front of us. No certificate system can ensure that vulnerable people are protected from visual poison. The question is 'why make it in the first place?' . The same thought applies to those who say that slick, amoral garbage such as 'Grand Theft Auto' has an '18' certificate and so it is not the makers' fault if it pollutes young minds.

Gabriela Scherer, being brief for once, rules that I cannot use the word 'disaster' as I wish. She suggests that anything short of the catastrophe that is Haiti cannot qualify for this description. Surely this ignores the point that a disaster is not a static thing, but involves a severe change for the worse? It is therefore by its nature a comparison with what had gone before, or with a realistic alternative set of events. The European Union has destroyed the British fishing industry, severely damaged British agriculture and ( see the many writings of Christopher Booker on this subject) done devastating damage to previously healthy British businesses of all kinds. Most importantly, it has also, for the first time in centuries, established foreign rule over Britain, which I personally regard as a disastrous loss of my birthright.

When I was in Haiti, some years ago, the desperate state of the country seemed to be permanent, unchanging and pretty much unalterable in current circumstances. It hadn't just happened, it wasn't new and there was no realistic alternative - since some sort of outside rule, which seems to me to be the only hope for that sad place, is not allowed by the current fashion. The hopes placed in Jean-Bertrand Aristide had turned out to be unjustified. Miserable, desperate, hopeless, but much as it had been for as long as anyone could remember.

16 August 2008 11:47 PM

Women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk. No, this does not excuse rape.

Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been. But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy.

Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.

Yet a wave of hysterical ultra-feminist propaganda has this week forced a State agency to reverse a perfectly sensible decision to cut compensation to rape victims who were drunk.

Personally, I’m not sure where all this ‘compensation’ came from. It used to be grudgingly paid out. Now it flows in tens of millions (£200million last year) from the taxpayers’ pockets into the hands of the wronged.

I suspect it is the result of the almost total failure of the criminal justice system to prevent crime, catch culprits or punish them when caught. Instead of offering justice, the state provides a cheque.

So I suppose we must resign ourselves to the fact that a growing slice of our taxes will be handed over to victims of unsolved rapes, while rape itself increases – the inevitable result of the collapse of sexual morality.

But I cannot see why women who ignore the wisdom of the ages, and make themselves more likely to be victims by drinking too much, should get the same size cheque as women who are raped despite acting responsibly.

Someone called Bridget Prentice, a one-time teacher who now has the banana republic title of Justice Minister, actually said last week that ‘a victim of rape is not in any way culpable due to alcohol consumption’.

This is flatly untrue and she must know it is. Of course she is culpable, just as she would be culpable if she crashed a car and injured someone while drunk, or stepped out into the traffic while drunk and was run over. Getting drunk is not something that happens to you. It is something you do.

Nor is being drunk – which makes you miss danger signals, make bad judgments, lose consciousness in unsafe places and then lose your memory, too – comparable with ‘dressing provocatively’ as the feminist thought police would like to pretend.

If women want to dress provocatively, then they should be free to do so, and I say thanks a lot to those who do. Our society is based on self-restraint. We can be provoked and still behave ourselves.

We do not need to compel women to dress like bats, as many Muslim countries do, so as to curb the unchained passions of hot-blooded menfolk.

All the above is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet, in the main forums of public opinion, such views are becoming harder and harder to express because of the unreasoning storm of fury that will follow.

The collapse of the Tory party into the arms of Leftism has made this much worse, particularly on the BBC, which no longer feels any duty to give airtime to social and moral conservatives.

Will someone send this sabre-rattling twit a history book

I like Georgia. I like Georgians and their superb hospitality. I have several times travelled to that beautiful country. But I wouldn’t lift a finger to save it from the Russians.

What cause would we be serving? Democracy? Ha ha.

This Olympically corrupt statelet is not a law-governed democracy. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s nauseatingly named Rose Revolution was a putsch achieved by an orchestrated mob, followed by an election so shamelessly one-sided that our supposed hero got 96 per cent of the vote.

The only excuse for this was that previous elections had been rigged, too, which of course they had.

American-trained he may be, but his opponents and critics fall victim to blatantly Soviet-style methods of intimidation. He is also adept at bombastic propaganda.

Do we really want young men from the Midlands of England and the Lowlands of Scotland fighting and dying for years to come to save this dubious creature from his own unhinged, wilful conflict with the Kremlin?

You might think not, but David Cameron is all for it. In an amazing demonstration of unfitness for office, the Tory leader last week wrote one of the daftest articles I have ever seen.

He wants Georgia to be allowed into Nato, so committing this country to come to Georgia’s defence if it is attacked. He wants to do the same for Ukraine.

Will someone send this man an atlas and a history book? When will our political class stop trying to grow hairs on their teenage chests by starting wars and deploying forces we no longer have?

Why should we get entangled in this? What business is it of ours if Russia wants friends and allies on its borders, rather than a weird Nato alliance, kept on life-support long after it triumphantly achieved its purpose. What is Nato for now? Does anybody know? If they know, will they say?

No doubt some half-educated twerp will now accuse me of appeasement. There is certainly plentiful appeasement going on now – of the Provisional IRA and of the European Union.

But Britain has no interests in following American adventures in the Caucasus, let alone taking sides over the dangerous future of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is not Hitler – or Stalin. As for Neville Chamberlain, the stupidest thing he ever did was to promise to defend Poland, when he knew we couldn’t and wouldn’t do so.

When our bluff was called we were dragged by an unstable, rackety ally into a war we weren’t ready for and very nearly lost.

Who plays that part today?

Welcome to Nowhereville, West Midlands

Officials in Birmingham are in trouble for printing a picture of the wrong Birmingham (the one in Alabama) on a recycling leaflet.

I can’t see it’s such a big mistake. Both city skylines are almost identical masses of cuboid blocks, and I have often wondered if Birmingham’s city fathers were determined to turn the place into a copy of a North American burg, hideous freeways and all.

All too many British cities are going the same way, characterless nowherevilles, their old distinctive domes and spires overpowered by graceless geometric lumps.

* With A-level pass rates now resembling the results of a North Korean referendum, do I really still need to point out that these exams have been devalued?

I sense the professional liars who claimed for years that all was well have now given up. About time. But who will repair the damage they did?

* BBC reporter Colin Blane was describing, with some awe, the release of Sea Eagles into the wild somewhere in Scotland. He began by saying the eagles were 15 yards away, then suddenly revised this to 15 metres. Why?

The BBC deny the existence of any instructions to its staff to go metric.

But faced with a Freedom of Information Act request for details, they claim the Act doesn’t apply to such things.

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09 August 2008 11:45 PM

It is like the end of The War Of The Worlds, when the terrifying, invincible Martian monsters suddenly perish.

The New Labour Monster lies powerless and broken on the ground.

Tiny, unconvincing creatures, like the Eurofanatic David Miliband, scurry squeaking about the twisted wreckage but they cannot get it to work.

From beyond the political grave, the sugary voice of Anthony Blair is to be heard claiming that if only he were still in charge, this would never have happened – an idea that could be accepted only by someone suffering from total memory loss about this fraudulent warmonger.

And now, when almost anyone in a suit, and with normal facial features, could lead the Opposition to a smashing triumph, what have we got?

We have the Useless Tory Party, dedicated to the proposition that its only hope of getting into office is to copy the last 11 years of idiocy.

All the logic of the Blair years shows us that what is called ‘the Centre Left’ is bankrupt. The European Union has been an expensive disaster for this country, ruining swathes of our economy, destroying our independence – and then having the nerve to charge us for it.

Slavish following of American foreign policy has embroiled us in permanent wars from which we gain nothing.

Every promise of 1997 is shown up for the fake it was. The oceans of money have washed through the hospitals and left them crusted in filth and menaced by debt. The children of the poor cannot spell or count, and leave school clutching wads of certificates they cannot read, destined for lives of dole and drugs.

We are more under the thumb of foreign powers than at any time for 300 years. We are less free, poorer and worse governed. Disorder and crime are uncontrolled.

Nonsensical pledges of permanent economic stability have turned out to be bunk, as they always were.

Yet the Useless Tory Party’s answer is still to continue more or less as they are with a few fashionable tweaks and gimmicks. Once, this stupid and wrong policy could at least be excused by fear that the New Labour Monster might gird itself and slay the Conservatives once again with its dreaded Blairite death rays and the help of the shameless BBC.

With that fear gone, it is obvious that the Cameroon rabble support the Blairite programme not because they are timid or feeble (though they may well be) but because they are in fact Blairites.

Only a drivelling policeman could call this lucky

We are now much more likely to be savaged by ferals than to win the Lottery (with the added bonus that you don’t even have to buy a ticket to risk being pushed under a train or have your head kicked as if it were a football by a gang of lagered-up, doped-up teens).

So these days, when I hear the words ‘It could be you’, it is of ultra-violence I think.

If this happens to me, I should like to request that the police officers involved in trying (and probably failing) to catch the culprits should refrain from making drivelling pronouncements to the media.

I have in mind particularly the ridiculous copper who spoke after Linda Buchanan was pushed on to a railway track for daring to reprove a couple of militant smokers. Let us hope those responsible end up in smoke-free Ashworth secure mental hospital, rather than in a normal prison where they will be allowed to smoke and will be addressed respectfully by the warders.

Mrs Buchanan received a broken wrist and came within inches of being fried by an electric rail, not to mention dissected by a train.

She was not in any way fortunate.

Yet this officer declared: ‘She was very lucky she was not more seriously injured.’ Lucky? How is this lucky? Hasn’t this man got any forms to fill in, or a seminar on sex-changes to attend? Why does he feel the need to communicate these non-thoughts to us anyway?

Solzhenitsyn, not Mandela, is the real giant of freedom

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a far greater man than Nelson Mandela.

The wonder is that he was not recognised as such in his own lifetime, and it is only in the future, when our silly fads are buried with us, that our children and grandchildren will see we had a giant among us and were not interested.

Faced with the greatest and most heavily armed tyranny the world has ever seen, one which made even Verwoerd’s foul apartheid South Africa look relatively free and open, Solzhenitsyn defied that despotism with his pen and his voice, and nothing else.

When Western thinkers and writers still sucked up to the Kremlin, Solzhenitsyn suffered labour camps and horrible persecution for telling the truth they preferred to avoid. The fact that the word Gulag is now known everywhere is thanks to him. I think he began the mighty landslide that eventually swept away the seemingly impregnable fortress of Soviet power.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had trouble pronouncing his name, but their refusal to compromise with Moscow, and their recognition that the USSR was not just another great power, but a genuinely evil empire, was mainly inspired by him.

He never got the hero-worship he deserved because he embarrassed the ‘thinkers’ of the West, who to the very end continued to make excuses for secret police forces and concentration camps in the service of the Left.

Worse – from their point of view – he was a Christian, a patriot and a conservative, who thought the end of communism should mean more than a tidal wave of trashy rock music, gambling clubs, value-free sex and drugs.

* Say what you like about ‘dyslexia’ but one thing is beyond doubt. The militant defenders of this dubious diagnosis seem unable to read what its critics actually say. I knew when I mentioned it last week that I would be attacked by people claiming that I had described alleged ‘dyslexia’ sufferers as ‘thick, stupid and lazy’. The attacks duly arrived. But I did no such thing. It has always seemed to me that misrepresenting the arguments of your opponents is a sign not only that you’re losing but also that you know deep inside that you are losing.

* An interesting debate has erupted in the USA about the charming, witty film Wall-E. Is it Left-wing propaganda about saving the planet? Or is it an old-fashioned plea for individual love, courage, and a condemnation of globalist corporate greed? I think it’s a conservative movie, but in any case I urge you to judge for yourselves, safe in the knowledge that it is not fashionably ‘dark’ (ie obscenely violent and twisted) and can safely be watched by the young.